Business Insider Names University Professor Heidi Ellis One of 26 Most Powerful Women Engineers

Professor of Computer Science and Information Technology Dr. Heidi Ellis is named on Business Insider's 2016 list of the 26 most powerful women engineers to watch.

As part of National Engineer's Week, Feb. 21 -27, Business Insider released a list of women engineers with powerful careers who are leading important technologies at their companies or being pioneers in other ways. The list included women engineers from a variety of companies including Intel, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Oracle.

Dr. Ellis joined Western New England University in 2009 where she has been teaching students to code. She has been a contributor to many important open-source projects for more than a decade.

Dr. Ellis is working closely with Red Hat to expand the Professors' Open Source Software Experience, encouraging more professors to teach open-source coding. She is one of the founding members of the Humanitarian - Free and Open Source Software (H-FOSS), where students write free, open-source software for projects that improve the human condition, such as apps that help during natural disasters and track disease outbreaks. Ellis is also a founding member of a project called Foss2Serve, which helps encourage more students to participate in H-FOSS by educating professors about its mission.

Dr. Ellis’ research interests include software engineering education, open source software, and tools for biological data analysis. Dr. Ellis is PI/Co-PI on three NSF projects that support student involvement in H-FOSS projects.